I made the short CUSTOMER COPY about two years ago, intended to accompany the brief essay that is included here in Spanish and English. I had the good fortune of forgetting this work, and now, at last, I am able to observe it with less pity and more honesty, for it no longer belongs to me.

CUSTOMER COPY [ english ]

RECEIPTS—like photographs, tweets, text messages, telegrams—are narrative products of exchange. Commerce generates these footprints; cash registers are the scribes. One can construct a novel, report or documentary with only receipts. An indisputable compendium of a life. Receipts are so precise that they disallow us the wonders of forgetting. A portrait made of receipts would be less unfaithful that selfies, autobiographies, CVs, diplomas, elegies. That is to say, more honest and more cruel. Receipts produce an exact memory of surveilled moments. I confess that sometimes I make purchases without wanting to, simply to justify my presence in a space. Receipts are brief rental payments. Are they maps as well? Without a doubt, receipts catalogue our movements: I know that at 3:57 in the afternoon, October 16, 2013, on 171 Spring Street, New York, NY (zip code 10012), I paid $14.88 to a waiter named Thaddeus. One assumes that a few minutes later (not knowing how many minutes), I wrote—with a borrowed pen—the three dollars for the tip. This receipt provokes other, less exact memories: I recall whom I was with, of some of the dishes we ate, where we went afterwards. It is inevitable to declare that I don’t remember the server Thaddeus at all. Could he exist? It’s plausible that he does not remember us either. The name Thaddeus brings to mind another Thaddeus, a classmate from eighth grade, with whom I went to a basketball tournament, and who wanted to be an engineer specializing in demolitions—a profession which, at that time, awoke in me a certain juvenile distrust. What is certain is that, many years later, the waiter Thaddeus in New York has not kept any proof of my existence, at the tenth table, at three pm, on a day in October.